There have been thousands of words written about the 2024 presidential election, but I think Jeffrey Tucker’s article at Brownstone best summarized the sea change in votes cast , and Victor Davis Hanson best describes the cabinet nominees so far of greatest significance, people selected in part to avenge their treatment by the prior lawless administration.
Tucker argues that what we are seeing is an actual, not purported, transfer of power. A transfer from a permanent government to a new one actually responsive to actual voters against pollster predictions:
What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop. There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future. After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that. The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement. The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Hanson contends the nominees are reformers, not nihilators, who have themselves been victimized by the administrative state:
Many of Trump first-round picks share some common themes. One, many, who were in the past victimized by government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees, or proved sharp critics of the administrative state, are now, in karma-style, in charge of the very agencies that hounded him. So, Elon Musk, perennial target of government regulatory functionaries, was once policed, but now he polices the bureaucratic police. Robert Kennedy, Jr., proposed overseer of government health programs, was often blasted as a crank by the subsidized scientists and the administrators within HHS whom he will now direct. Pete Hegseth fought the military DEI machinery while a soldier in the ranks and wrote a book about the corruption of the Pentagon. He will now, if confirmed, run the Pentagon. Tulsi Gabbard was improperly put on a national security travel watch list as a supposed security threat -- and now will be a guardian of our security as Director of National Intelligence. Tom Homan was derided by the Biden administration and its Homeland Security minions as a fanatic border hawk; now he will run ICE and deal with the detritus of Biden fanaticism on the border. Two, none of these appointments are traditional swamp creatures. Few rotate from the think tanks. This time around there are no retired “Wise Men” or retired four-stars. Few are Uniparty magnificoes revolving back into high government from their DC university or New York corporate and investment waystations. None are DEI, cover-our-identity-politics-base candidates. By design, their past government service resumes are thin -- few past undersecretaries of these or special assistant to those. And there are not a lot of suffixed alphabetic letters or prefixed long-winded titles that adorn their names. In other words, they are vaxed from the sort of acculturated administrative state mindset that has alienated and terrified the citizenry.
In sum, they certainly reflect the same shift we saw in the voters.
The movement from an administrative state to the sort of republic the Founders envisioned, should be easier as a result of recent Supreme Court cases reining in an out-of-control unelected federal work force. This week even the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on the issue in Marin Audubon Society v. FAA, in which it held that the Council on Environmental Quality lacked any authority to prescribe the content of environmental impact statements, something it had been doing since 1978. Think! For over four decades this agency has been deciding when such statements are necessary (each of which cost thousands and thousands of dollars to prepare) and what they must contain while acting with no legal authority to do so. With regard to all federal agency action, every project’s organizers and their counsels have been complying without the Court's challenging by examining the National Environmental Policy Act to determine if the Council even had jurisdiction. Had they done so, they would have easily discovered the Council had appropriated to itself powers it did not have. I cannot think of a clearer example of how easily, without questioning, we have accepted the bureaucratic leviathan.
Vivek Ramaswamy, co-nominee for the head of the Department of Government efficiency (DOGE) made clear the chainsaw they intend to take to the bureaucratic state:
Here’s a key point about our mission at DOGE: eliminating bureaucratic regulations isn’t a mere policy preference. It’s a legal *mandate* from the U.S. Supreme Court: -- West Virginia v. EPA (2022) held that agencies cannot decide major questions of economic or political significance without "clear congressional authorization." This applies to *thousands* of rules that never passed Congress. -- In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the Court ended Chevron deference, which means agencies can't foist their own interpretations of the law onto the American people. Over 18,000 federal cases cited the Chevron doctrine, often to uphold regulations, many of which are now null & void. - In SEC v. Jarkesy (2024), SCOTUS restricted the use of "administrative law judges" by agencies. The same agency that wrote the rules shouldn't be able to prosecute citizens in “courts” that it controls. -- In Corner Post v. Board of Governors (2024), the Court held that new businesses can challenge old regulations, greatly expanding the statute of limitations & opening many more rules up for scrutiny. So we shouldn't just look at rules passed in the last 4 years, but over the past 4 decades (or more).
Administrative Courts inside the executive branch with which Jarkesy dealt, are found within the Department of Labor, the FDA, EPA, and SEC. As I read Jarkesy, no longer can any such court adjudicate disputes that relate to their agency’s regulations. If the agency has such a dispute, they will have to take it to a federal court to decide. This administration will shut down those courts. I agree with the X Poster Cynical Publius, this is a monumental change:
What he is saying is that the federal government will stop enforcing all rules that were authorized by the Chevron doctrine and that we're going to shut down all federal administrative law courts housed in the Executive Branch. Huge. Yuge. Enormous. This is Martin Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. This is the most transformational thing to happen in U.S. governance since Woodrow Wilson started the misbegotten "Progressive" era. The best thing is, they do not need Congressional approval to do any of this and challenges to their actions will fail in the federal courts because they are simply following SCOTUS rulings.
This week also saw a battle for the post of Senate majority leader with senators John Thune, John Cornyn, and Rick Scott in contention. Many conservatives preferred Scott, in part because they believed Thune and Cornyn had acquiesced too often to Mitch McConnell’s take it or leave it autocratic ways. Thune was selected, doubtless because he seems to have better personal relations and a more engaging style among his colleagues. Clint Brown suggests to those disappointed in the outcome that under Thune reform is coming, that Thune has promised that senators will now have the right to amend, cut, and change legislation and ”vote on specific provisions of bills until they reach agreement.” That means voters, too, will have a possibility for greater input and senators will be more accountable to constituents.
Much debate has involved the ability of the president to get his nominees confirmed. He wants them in office as soon as possible, and to keep the FBI from holding them up has even engaged private security officers instead of the FBI, to vet some of them. (Any criticism of this, which he has a right to do, should be countered by the fact that the FBI did the security checks on the Iranian agents and assets which permeate the Biden administration, along with the sabotaging of Trump's prior administration by the FBI.) Will we see long drawn-out contentious confirmation hearings? Will the president find a way to make recess appointments? Can he place his nominees in acting slots prior to confirmation? I don’t know. I do know I’d never bet against Trump getting what he goes for.
In my view Mark Halperin, who is usually right on the mark respecting predictions of political behavior, says that even the two most controversial of the nominees -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Matt Gaetz -- will be confirmed. “Because for one thing, every Republican senator has constituents, donors, staff, family members in some cases, who want jobs in the Trump administration.”
Self-interest. It’s what wins elections and congressional battles.
